Aside from very many small fixes and improvements to various pages (by more than 30 contributors!), the most notable changes in man-pages-3.80 are the following:

A new ioctl_fat(2) man page, written by Heinrich Schuchardt, documents the ioctl() operations that are implemented for FAT filesystems.

Over the years, as various flags were added to the madvise() system call, the madvise(2) man page had failed to keep up with various details, and existing information in the page did not apply to the new flags. The page has been substantially revised and reorganized for this release.

Several more (mainly Section 2) pages add a C library/kernel ABI differences subheading that marks text that describes differences between the behavior of the glibc wrapper function described in the page and the underlying raw system call.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

I've scheduled a further 5-day Linux/UNIX System Programming course to take place in Munich, Germany, for the week of 4-8 May 2015.

The course is intended for programmers developing system-level, embedded, or network applications for Linux and UNIX systems, or programmers porting such applications from other operating systems (e.g., Windows) to Linux or UNIX. The course is based on my book, The Linux Programming Interface (TLPI), and covers topics such as low-level file I/O;
signals and timers; creating processes and executing programs; POSIX
threads programming; interprocess communication (pipes, FIFOs, message
queues, semaphores, shared memory), and network programming (sockets).

The course has a lecture+lab format, and
devotes substantial time to working on some carefully chosen programming
exercises that put the "theory" into practice. Students receive printed and electronic copies of TLPI, along with a 600-page course book that includes all slides presented in the course. A reading knowledge of C is
assumed; no previous system programming experience is needed.

Aside from many smaller fixes and improvements to various pages, the most notable changes in man-pages-3.79 are the following:

A new getrandom(2) page has been added. This page, written by Heinrich Schuchardt, Ted T'so, and me, describes the getrandom() system call that was added in Linux 3.17.

The kexec_load(2) page has been substantially updated by Vivek Goyal and me. Documentation of the kexec_file_load() system call that was added in Linux 3.17 has been added to the page. In addition, the documentation of the older kexec_load() system call has been substantially improved.